No more torrents will help more content to be shared, render "copyright watchdogs" more toothless

The Pirate Bay has long been synonymous with one thing -- torrents. The world's largest torrent site has had more than its fair share of legal headaches [1][2][3] over the years for promoting the ubiquitous file-sharing mechanism. Consequentially on Feb. 29 in will be taking what on the surface appears to be a mind-blowing move -- deleting all torrents hosted directly on the site, which are being actively shared by more than 10 individuals.

But in reality this move is not as mind-blowing and drastic a departure from the site's operational model as some are thinking/hoping/fearing.

The site will continue to host the content, where possible, via magnet links. All new content will be hosted via magnetic links.

The Pirate Bay can now be compressed to a 90 MB torrent-free site, for easy hosting. Under the new scheme scores of new users will be able to host free proxy servers for The Pirate Bay, helping it escape takedown attempts, local firewalls, or ISP restrictions.

At the same time The Pirate Bay washes its hands of any of the actual process of file-sharing. It is simply hosting magnet links -- links to torrents which share the same unique hash value. In that regard, thousands, if not millions of users will be privately hosting the scores of torrents that make up The Pirate Bay users worldwide know and love.

And it will be far harder for lawyers and regulators to pin wrongdoing on The Pirate Bay -- assuming that the members of the international judicial committee understand how the technology works and are willing to give a fair trial, at least. In short, magnet links are the future of filesharing and The Pirate Bay's decision to force their adoption is a sound one in terms of its future.

In essence it will be impossible for the RIAA or MPAA to put millions of Americans in prison or fine them. So ultimately, magnet links and other new technologies may force the RIAA, MPAA, and government to abandon traditional enforcement of file-sharing. Thus the groups' long-standing dream of taking down The Pirate Bay's torrents has just become their worst nightmare.

It should be interesting how the self-proclaimed "anti-piracy" advocates by day, for-profit pirates by night globally react to this new technological marvel.

I have pirated games before on my computer. I think that games should be free to play (at least demos like there used to be) with an option to upgrade for more features/areas/contect/etc... so that you can actually play the game and see it and decide if you want it. I have played a few games like this online and the ones I like I can pay for. I am willing to pay for games that I like and play, even usually more than a $50 game I only pay for once, that model just seems nicer to me. I pirated Mirrors Edge not sure if I would like it. After playing a few levels I deleted it from my machine and purchased it from EA. I have no problem paying for the items I want and would like to support (I also buy a lot of my music, I like to support my artist) and I think that if you give people the option to do this companies would start seeing more money and loyalty. Maybe I'm crazy?

Crappiest birthday present I ever got and Walmart wouldn't take it back. It was put in my NES a total of 4 times, once when I got it and found out how horrible it was and 3 times to show various people how horrible it was.

Should be a crime to make a game that bad.

That being said, I've probably got over $1500 invested in various racing games and peripherals, nearly every Street Fighter out there, pirated a couple of games and bought them because they deserve to be paid for their work.

Make sure the product is worth the money and the DRM doesn't make it easier to pirate than purchase and people will buy it.

Sad fact, I've had a few movies I've bought on DVD that won't display properly on my TV, several that wouldn't read in a PS3 or my PC. I downloaded a ripped copy of a DVD that I own so I could watch it full screen without buggy menus, tiny video or trailers that I couldn't skip.

This argument is pretty bunk. I am not for piracy or all that against it (bad business models must be fixed), but saying you got a bad game is a reason for piracy is ridiculous.

There are tons of products that turn out to be bad that you are stuck with. For example, you tried the no name brand of Cheerios and didn't like them, can you expect a refund? Should have you stolen them first and if you liked them then start buying them? What about a lemon car; I can't imagine you would advocate stealing a Ford Focus to try it out before buying it.

Risk is part of the purchase; read the back of the box, read reviews, talk to friends, then decide for or against the purchase. Since when is it risk free to be a consumer with a guarantee of satisfaction?

Movies are the exact same, I have never heard of someone pirating a movie and then buying it because they thought it was good.

quote: There are tons of products that turn out to be bad that you are stuck with. For example, you tried the no name brand of Cheerios and didn't like them, can you expect a refund? Should have you stolen them first and if you liked them then start buying them? What about a lemon car; I can't imagine you would advocate stealing a Ford Focus to try it out before buying it.

Your examples are pretty bunk. Cheerios are not a product that people aren't already familiar with. That being said, they give away samples of cereal all the time to get people to try their product before they buy it.

Also I'm pretty sure you can go down to your local Ford dealer and test drive a Focus before you buy it.

Actually, you can return food to the store, and the general policy is to take it back, no questions asked. I have done so before when what I ate tasted terrible. It's just that our perception of food purchases is such that we don't return it, but rather we just don't buy it again. That's because food is fairly predictable, while "art" and technology are not.

Also if Cheerios were priced at $50 per box, I imagine more people would be returning a bad box than throwing them out. On the other hand if video games only cost $3 each then more people would buy them not worrying if they were going to be bad or not.

On top of all the other arguments about food and cars and such, there is also the matter of money.

If you buy a car, you're going to test drive it. Anyone who doesn't test drive a car before buying gets what they deserve.

If you buy food you don't like, it's a whole lot cheaper than a video game. So what if you're out $4 on a box a cereal, or $3 on a can of corned beef hash? That's no big deal.

However, not being able to test drive a game before buying, or listen to a CD before buying, is a bad thing all the way around. I have been stuck with games I spent $40-60 on and they were horrible. With the whole anti-piracy thing, we can't take them back. I have at least a dozen CD's that I bought before the whole mp3 thing took off that are absolutely horrible. I'm out $15 each on those. New albums, known artists, one good song I heard, and the rest of the disk sucked. I figure I'm out about $4000 on stuff like this that I tried, hated, and never used again. What's worse is I can never tell when the next one is going to be. The "entertainment" companies thrive on that very business model. That's what's criminal.

At least at a movie theater, I can walk out halfway through a bad movie and ask for my money back. There really isn't a reason to pirate movies. Sure, lots of movies suck. Go to the theater and check them out, and if you don't like it walk out and ask for your money back from the theater. If you wait until it comes out on DVD, talk to friends who have seen it, read critical reviews, but don't pirate the movie. That is just stealing.

quote: What about a lemon car; I can't imagine you would advocate stealing a Ford Focus to try it out before buying it.

No need to steal one because car dealers let you take a car out for a free test drive before buying it. So the question is, why can't you take music or movies out for a free test drive before buying them?

Back when they were still around, the retail music stores would let you listen to CDs before buying them. And Amazon (and I presume iTunes) lets you hear part of a song before buying it. I think that's the direction the studios need to go on this if they want to reduce piracy. People want to preview these products before buying. Preventing such previews or making them difficult will just drive people towards piracy.

quote: Risk is part of the purchase; read the back of the box, read reviews, talk to friends, then decide for or against the purchase. Since when is it risk free to be a consumer with a guarantee of satisfaction?

Actually, I don't think anyone buys a movie they've never seen. They've seen the movie, and liked it enough to want to own a copy. People who've just read a few reviews or heard from friends that it's a good movie will typically rent or pirate it.

The reason online movie piracy is rampant is partly because the industry has been slow to support streamed rentals at a reasonable price (e.g. Netflix). In general, people aren't evil.* They realize a lot of work and money went into making a movie, and they're willing to do the right thing and pay for it. But at the same time they want it to be convenient for them. If you make it a contest between convenience for themselves versus doing the right thing for the studios, their convenience is going to win out and they'll just pirate it.

* All of civilized society is based on this premise that people in general aren't evil. If you've ever seen a riot, you've seen that the police force in every civilized country is vastly inadequate for keeping peace and order if people in general were evil. So any legal construct which is based on the assumption that people are evil is flawed IMHO. Let people do whatever they want, and make illegal the few behaviors which are undesirable. Do not assume everyone is evil, and make laws which make it impossible for people to even have the opportunity to engage in undesirable behaviors (e.g. DRM).

quote: No need to steal one because car dealers let you take a car out for a free test drive before buying it. So the question is, why can't you take music or movies out for a free test drive before buying them?

Not all music I like is featured on the radio. I live in the largest city in my state and we have only two local radio stations that venture out of the "pop/country/oldies/classic rock" music genre. I don't prefer any of those genres (although I can listen to classic rock from time to time). If I'm sitting at my computer, I'm nearly always playing a game so internet radio stations don't apply to me. At work, we aren't allowed to stream.

Not all groups have the money backing to get on the radio these days. It takes HUGE amounts of money to get your song played on the radio now, which is why you only hear the same 20 or so songs on the radio now.

I think the real problem is that most people don't intuitively understand how to deal with non-consumable goods. Some try to equate it to stealing, which it's not, and this just confuses the issue further.I've found that the best thing to do is:A) look at it from a legal perspective. The law's say "this" so base your decisions on the legality of what you're doing.B) patron of the arts perspective. Do you feel like this "work of art" (i.e. a product of the mind) is good enough that you would like it's creators to continue producing similar works?

Looking at those two questions, I feel that "B" is more important, and that I feel obligated to ensure that the creators of the work get at least some money if the work is worth my time in the first place.

I do not pirate anything at all these days, because I can simply rent whatever I want for far cheaper than I can buy it, or in less time than finding/downloading/paring/extracting/scanning/conv erting/testing/re-sizing/saving it, all on top of hardware costs. I'll never have enough time to watch/play everything I'd like anyway, and that's without watching or playing something more than once.

i don't really think it's fair to say that people pirate because of lack of availability on stream. I'd say the majority of pirates are simply people not interested in buying the product in the first place, then you have another category created by the insanely intrusive DRM and advertising schemes movie studios have been implementing and looking for an easier solution, and to a certain degree people who just don't feel like paying even if they want the actual product.

I personally agree that there should be better methods of preview, but it's hard to do with video games. Games rely heavily on the launch sales, since that's when they get the most attention and subsequent shelf space. Games are also created using a lot of redundant information distributed throughout the disc. To get a demo you'd either need an entirely separate demo build or a slice of the actual game (which would require most, if not all of the game's assets to be installed). It's much easier said than done. You can't really resale a game multiple times like you can with a movie, going from theaters to blu-ray to PPV to licensing etc.

Back when I was a kid, I would take apart our VHS tapes and literally cut out the 10 minutes of commercials from the beginning. I rip the DVD's now, remove the bloat, and burn the vobs onto DVD's, put those in the DVD case, and then put the originals in my room. This way, when I want to watch a DVD that I have purchased, I don't have to sit there and keep pressing the menu button just to get to the title screen. It is the MPAA's fault for making .avi files so much easier to deal with than DVD's.

Yeah and they keep holding back features so that you have to keep buying 12 different versions of the same damn movie. It makes me want to break into the damn Disney Vault and spread the contents to the masses lol. I think this is one the reasons why people stop buying crap. They have to upgrade their collection every 5 years because of the next big thing. Well unfortunately for the studios, I think the 3D fad isn't cutting it and everyone is happy with DVDs and/or BDs. Their revenue stream will dry up fast (the disc sales portion of it I mean). So I would expect other portions of their sales to experience a price increase (e.g. theatre tickets, online rentals/Netflix, etc.).

If I am right, I think piracy will decrease due to the increased satisfaction people have by buying discs. But piracy will increase when they raise prices in other areas. Whatever... I have Netflix (ironically something the studios want to kill) and have not had the inclination to pirate ever since I first subscribed. I have so much stuff to watch via Netflix that I don't have time to watch anything else (e.g. pirated movies).

Back when I was a kid, I would take apart our VHS tapes and literally cut out the 10 minutes of commercials from the beginning. I rip the DVD's now, remove the bloat, burn the vobs onto DVD's, put enhanced DVDs into the original case, and then put the originals in my room. This way, when I want to watch a DVD that I have purchased, I don't have to sit there and keep pressing the menu button just to get to the title screen. It is the MPAA's fault for making .avi files so much easier to deal with than DVD's.

My apologies for the double post; I received a server error from Dailytech, pressed the back button... pressed the submit button again... received another server error from Dailytech (mind you, I was also talking with someone through my gmail, so I know the problem wasn't on my end. I really need to just block this site so that I'm not tempted to return, only to get pissed because the site likes to error out and the admins are too stupid to fix it. I'm having flashbacks to how MySpace was back in 2005-2006.

Never owned a NES so I looked it up. It turned out somebody has made a review of this "game" (and its sequel) and posted it on Youtube. You can check it out, the video is interesting to watch if you're unfamiliar with the game as I was :-)

Completely agree. Games and movies. Paid far too many times for what could unquestionably be considered absolute crap. I won't buy a game anymore without a demo or a rating of 9 or higher by the general public. As for movies, they love to pump their ratings, even on total chunder so I have no problem when someone hands me a copy of a movie they ripped off.

Point being, I've paid for my fair share of crap. Stop turning out utter crap product, trying to pull the wool over the consumers eyes, and expect to get away with it. I hope the RIAA and similar companies choke as well!

Good on the Pirate bay, even though I don't use it, for giving them the middle finger.

That's just another excuse to pirate things. You don't need a $60 game right now . If you can't afford $60, there should be a ton of games that are 2 or 3 years old you could buy for less than $10. If there are NO games from 2 or 3 years ago that you haven't played and you can't afford to pay $60 for a game, I'll go out on a limb and say you spend to much time playing video games :) The "having a little patience" system works great for me. I got Deus Ex Human Revolution on sale on Steam a few months back for $10. That game was worth my $50 way more so than Mirror's Edge! If that game had a developer tip jar, I would have dropped some money in.

Anyway, not judging, I think games are overpriced, and I'm just mentioning that there are legal alternatives that will let you play them for less.

Cokes around here are still $0.50 in the vending machines and if you buy a 12 pack they are less than that.

Sure that Zelda game would cost over $100 now adjusted for inflation, but what would the game console also cost if adjusted similarly? The technology has advanced so much that making a game is much less expensive now than then, and honestly some of those games back then had more thought put into their story lines than some of the junk today. How many ways can you shoot zombies anyhow?!

How many movies do you need about zombies also? Seems half the movies out recently are either another way to tell a zombie story or a remake of a remade movie that happened to be a hit 50 years ago when it was originally made the first time.

quote: The technology has advanced so much that making a game is much less expensive now than then

This is just insane. The average game costs about twenty million dollars and a fleet of employees to make nowadays. Compare that to Rare making games with a handful of guys, or hell Will Wright making games in his basement.

Games are literally cheaper than they used to be, yet they cost much more to make, and take longer to make. I don't know where this idea that games are overpriced comes from. Just because someone tosses a game out on android/ios market for free doesn't mean that games cost nothing to make.

The legend of zelda cost $6 million to develop back in 1985-86. If you where to make the exact same game today, same graphics same functionality, you could probably make it for under $100,000 of todays money, which would be $50,000 in 1986 money. While that $6 million back then would be $12 million now.

That's the point. The same amount of money spent got you zelda 2 in 1987 and call of duty 4 in 2007.

Games have gotten cheaper because of economy of scale. Zelda was the first game to hit more then 1 million units sold in the USA, and managed 6,5 million worldwide, while targeted at a pretty broad audience. CoD4 managed 13 million sales worldwide while being targeted at a pretty select audience (the action FPS crowd), with much more market saturation from similar games. There's simply a much larger market.

Even so you're not correct because, minecraft. Cost nothing to make, made ~$60 million i'm sure of and probably another ~10 million i missed. The old school way lives, there's just a huge, mature market ontop of it which makes it a bit more rare to come by.

That doesn't make any sense either, because those types of games are sold for dollars, or given away for free on platforms like android/iOS. Minecraft is also sold for 15 dollars, and is a rare case in general since it was an infiniminer clone developed by one person. Those types of indie games normally track to thousands, not millions like minecraft, which is why minecraft gets so much attention.

Games considered out of date and easily made thanks to software advancements are incredibly cheap, and games utilizing massive developers are also cheaper. How exactly are games more expensive nowadays?

What do you think costs more money to make? A main character which consists of a 2D sprite or a main character consisting of 10,000 polygons + rig + animations + diffuse skin + specular skin + normal map made from a 1,5 million polygon version of the same model?

Well, if you take in account not that you no longer purchase games, they grant you a license to use, and they intend to move to server side and/or streaming, yeah, games have become of the most over expensive utter pieces of shit you can find in a market.

Your comparison with Zelda is moot, back then you paid for the game and took the cart home and it was yours to do as you saw fit, including trading it with friends and selling it used.

$60 for a POS they won't allow me to own, yes, absolutely over priced, $100+ for an actual purchase, fair price.

That's how it's always been. Software has always been licensee, your zelda cart or otherwise. The only difference now is that people can regulate copying/distribution a bit using online verification. Yeah it sucks, but nothings changed when it comes to ownership.

So... you're telling me what I can think? Sorry, but that's dumb. To me (key words there) most games are not worth $50-$60. Therefore: "I think games are overpriced." If the economics of game development and the rate of inflation are important considerations for you when you purchase games... good for you, I guess? Personally, I buy stuff when the price matches what it's worth to me .

I think everything should be free in life. So I can just sit at home and do nothing and have an endless supply of food, wine, music, films, games, and prostitutes. I'm not quite sure why anyone would work to create these things for me though.. but lets not let thinking get in the way of my desire to have everything for free. Long live theft!

I understand magnets are where tpb is going, but I think a link or blurb about what makes a magnet different from a torrent and comparing/contrasting them would have been useful to this article. I will now go out and research myself because I am curious, but a 1 stop would not have been bad. Magnets are referenced as a matter of fact alternative solution in the article.

I used to be a huge game pirate until steam came along. You make something easy to use, make the DRM seamless so you dont even know its there and people will use it. Not to mention steam sales... my wallet takes a hit every time one of those happens.